It's ironic, really.
When I was about forty-four I realised that I was having difficulty getting the enlarger focussed, so I had a pair of specs made and that was that. Shorty afterwards, I decided to give up all ideas about continuing darkroom work because of the realities of water on this island and, added to that, the fact that my work had become 100% transparencies. So apart from reading the Sunday Times now and then - when I could prise it away from my wife - those glasses remained in their case.
However, at the other end of the visual scale, my distance vision appears to have been somewhat extraordinary at that time. Friends of ours owned a penthouse on the Paseo Maritimo in Palma, and I remember sitting out on the roof terrace they had, looking at some ships at anchor in the Bay of Palma. I happened to remark about the company insignia on the funnel of one of them, and our friends' son called me out on it. He suggested that I knew something about that ship already, or it would have been impossible for me to read the stuff on the funnel: far too far away. That annoyed me a little bit, but I told him nope, never seen the thing in my life before, and that as he knew perfectly well, I didn't live in Palma. Anyway, he went indoors and returned with binoculars, and yes, I had been right. Whether his own vision was impaired or not, I don't know. Obviously, to me I thought seeing what I saw was normal.
Anyway, years later I started to experience difficulty focussing the digital Nikon, and the problem was that if I could nail focus rapidly, then I was okay, but if not, then I'd hunt focus so long that I could never be sure where the hell the point of maximum crispness really lay. I had no af lenses in those days. A few years later, I mentioned this to the doc. whilst there on another matter, and he set me up for an appointment at the local hospital. I ended up being diagnosed with glaucoma, and the result has been that my early distance abilty has vanished but I can now read the tiniest print without any problems whatsoever. Talk about reversal development! If there's a positve, it's that I no longer need specs to use the computer.
Rob